London Belongs to Us Page 13

  ‘Well, we were all meant to be meeting in this club in Mayfair,’ Flick says. She runs an eye over me, like I’m an item that won’t scan at the self-service checkout. ‘I’d better go on ahead. Run interference. Tell Tab that you’re cool and that you’re totally on board with the making Mark sorry that he was ever born. Only thing is that this club is members only.’

  ‘Members only! Shmembers only!’ I put my hands on my hips. ‘They’d better let me in or I’ll make them sorry they were born too.’

  I wasn’t sure who they were, but if they tried to stop me from a face-to-face confrontation with Mark then they’d wish they’d never tried.

  ‘Now these are the feelings you should be owning,’ Jeane says and Vic promises me that we’ll storm the door, British Bulldog style, if we have to, and Jean-Luc says that he’ll create a diversion by talking French to them very loudly and with a lot of hand gestures, and Molly says we can have a lift in the Duckie van but we need to leave now.

  Only Emmeline seems uncharacte‌ristically reluctant to seek vengeance on Mark, which is ironic considering that she never liked him in the first place. ‘Oh? So you wanted to take Mark down tonight then. Like, right now?’ she asks with a frown. ‘Because I was kinda hoping that we could go home and take him down tomorrow. It’s just that it’s nearly three in the morning and I’m tired and I’m not wearing trainer socks and the backs of my heels are really rubbing.’

  She sounds really whiny. In fact, she sounds a lot like me, as if we’ve been bodyswapped in a Freaky Friday-style cosmic accident.

  ‘C’mon, Em! Where’s your fighting spirit?’ I pick up one of her limp hands to gee her up but it’s like holding a dead fish. ‘I have blister plasters and you can sleep when you’re dead.’

  Emmeline sighs. ‘OK, but if a night bus to Crouch End suddenly materialises in front of me then all bets are off.’

  WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WITH MY SATURDAY NIGHT?

  2.53 a.m.

  MAYFAIR

  One of the richest areas of London, and the most expensive square to land on in Monopoly, Mayfair took its name from the annual fortnight long May Fair that ran in the area from the late seventeenth century onwards.

  Much of the area was owned and developed by the richer-than-God Grosvenor family in the mid-seventeenth century, who were then awarded the dukedom of Westminster, which was nice for them. Mayfair quickly became the most fashionable district in London and was the haunt of king of the dandies, Beau Brummel, famed for his elaborate neckcloths, who used to sit in the window of the gentlemen’s club Whites and pass judgement on the outfits of his friends as they passed by. Kind of like a Regency-era Sidebar of Shame.

  Famous Mayfair residents include several prime ministers including Sir Winston Churchill, the composer George Frideric Handel and the two greatest Madges that ever Madged: Madonna and Her Majesty the Queen who was born in a house on Bruton Street.

  It’s almost too amazing to comprehend. I’m wearing one of Molly Montgomery’s spare T-shirts. A T-shirt owned and previously worn by Molly Montgomery. It’s yellow and in big black block letters it says: A CITY BUILT ON ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IS STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND.

  If that wasn’t enough, more than enough, Molly has given me her address in Brighton, so I can post the T-shirt back to her. ‘I’m sure you’re not a stalker,’ she’d said, which goes to show how little she knows about me.

  I’m wedged into the back of the Duckie tour van, with all four members of Duckie, Emmeline, Charlie, Vic and Jean-Luc. Preeta and Lucy had begged off and got the nightbus home, Emmeline and Charlie looking longingly after them. Flick and her friends had planned to come with us but when Jane opened the doors of the van and a smell of stale lager and cheesy feet wafted out, they backtracked. ‘Actually there isn’t much room, we’d be better getting in a nice black cab,’ Flick had said, but she’d promised on her pony Melisande’s life to text me once she’d spoken to Tabitha and found out Mark’s location.

  Once we get past Piccadilly Circus, it doesn’t take very long to career around the tiny, twisty roads that run parallel to Piccadilly and all the while I’m clenching my fists and thinking about what I’m going to do to Mark. Probably going to start off by bellowing, ‘Oi! I want a word with you!’ then after that I’ll kick it freestyle. I may even kick Mark freestyle, though Emmeline says that violence is only the answer when you’re playing roller derby.

  Right now, though, Emmeline looks like she might be rethinking that philosophy. Her eyes promise death by unimaginable pain as Vic gestures at her and Charlie and says, ‘So you two, then? You a thing or is it just a phase you’re going through?’

  ‘Right, well, first of all sexual identity is a fluid concept and not a fixed point on a graph, and secondly, it’s none of your bloody business,’ Charlie says. She gestures at Vic and Jean-Luc. ‘Anyway, what about you two? Are you a thing or is it just a phase you’re going through.’

  ‘We’re cousins,’ Vic says, while Jean-Luc shakes his head and sighs and probably wonders why he ever left Paris. ‘And if I were gay, he wouldn’t be my type. Too moody, too bony, not pretty enough.’

  ‘Prettier than you,’ Jean-Luc mutters, though I’m not sure that technically he is. If there were a scale of prettiness, Vic would probably get a higher score than Jean-Luc. When Vic smiles, his eyes light up and his whole face is this lovely, welcoming thing. Jean-Luc hardly smiles at all.

  Tomorrow, Emmeline and I must sit down and talk about which Godard is foxier, objectively speaking.

  ‘If you’re so pretty then how come you haven’t hooked up with a single girl since you rocked up at St Pancras?’ Vic wags a finger at Jean-Luc. ‘Or is the only thing that gets you hot your choux pastry?’

  ‘Casse-toi! ’ Jean-Luc says without much heat. Then he smiles. No, it really isn’t as pretty as Vic’s smile, but there’s something wicked about it, which looks a lot more fun. ‘Ah Jane, I was meaning to ask, how long were you and Vic dating?’

  ‘You what?’ Jane’s sitting up front but now she turns around. ‘Me and Vic? Something get lost in translation?’

  ‘Vic says –’ Vic clamps his hand over Jean-Luc’s mouth so he can’t actually speak.

  ‘Ignore him. His English isn’t too good.‘

  Jane pulls a face. ‘I’d say his English is excellent.’

  ‘Honestly, Jane, he’s a bit touched in the head. Lot of inbreeding on that side of the family so … Ow! Get your hand out of my face!’

  Even sitting down in a moving vehicle, Vic and Jean-Luc are tussling. ‘That’s actually quite hot,’ Charlie murmurs to Emmeline. ‘With the suits and everything.’

  ‘Hmmm. I know. And the hair and the swearing in French. At least, I think it’s swearing.’

  ‘So, Jane, Vic says that you and he go way, way, way back,’ I pipe up from the cheap seats, by which I mean sitting by a wheel arch with a guitar case pressing into my kidneys. ‘But that a gentlemen never kisses and tells, even though he’s no gentleman.’

  Jane bares her teeth. ‘Yeah, I guess we do go way back, right back to the time I first met him, which was when I commissioned him to make my wedding cake. Great cake, but then he tried to get off with my Auntie Cheryl at the reception.’ She throws her head back and the only word for the sound that comes out of her mouth is a guffaw. Maybe two words: hearty guffaw. ‘Didn’t go down too well with my Uncle Ron, did it, Vic?’

  Vic succeeds in batting Jean-Luc’s hands away. ‘It’s not my fault. Ma chère Cheryl, she’s a hell of a looker for a woman her age.’

  ‘You biddy fiddler,’ Emmeline mutters and there’s a collective gasp because Emmeline went there, then Molly starts laughing and I’m still giggling when we get dropped off across the road from The Ritz.

  My grandmother has been promising to take me to The Ritz for afternoon tea for as long as I can remember. That we’ll get all dressed up in vintage frocks and do it properly, but every time she does come up to town, we always end up spending hours in John Lewis so she can buy boring
things like embroidery yarn and moth strips and it never happens.

  It isn’t happening tonight either. We congregate on a street corner and everyone looks at me expectantly.

  ‘So, what’s the plan then?’ Charlie asks. ‘We just gonna hang around waiting to get a text from this Flick?’

  That was the plan but it sounds a bit crap when Charlie says it. Also, I wasn’t in the mood for hanging about. I was in the mood for action. For doing, not loitering aimlessly on street corners.

  ‘Why are you doing that funny dance?’ Vic asks and I realise that I’m swaying from foot to foot and, oh God, screwing up my face and making little panting noises as if I’m one of the pregnant women from One Born Every Minute and I’m on the home stretch. I am doing …

  ‘The wee-wee dance,’ Emmeline exclaims and she could have been more discreet about it, even if she is right. Emmeline has seen my wee-wee dance before. Many many times before.

  I ignore Emmeline and look up and down Piccadilly in the hope that there’s a Burger King or a McDonald’s still open so I can buy the cheapest thing on the menu, then rush off to relieve my agony. Yes, it was already fast approaching agony now.

  ‘What’s the wee-wee dance?’ Jean-Luc asks. ‘Is it some English thing?’

  ‘I need a wee, all right?’ There’s no time to dress it up, say that I need to powder my nose or splash my face with cold water. I need a toilet and I need it now. Yesterday. ‘Oh God, how I need a wee!’

  I’m already speedwalking down the road. I can feel everything sloshing about in my bladder. It’s very unpleasant.

  ‘But why didn’t you go before? You were in the bathroom for ages,’ Charlie asks accusingly as the others catch up with me. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Having lager thrown over me, mostly.’

  ‘I’m not surprised you need a wee,’ Vic says. ‘That drink you had in the chicken shop was bigger than your head.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks for reminding me.’

  We’re heading further and further away from Piccadilly Circus as I desperately look for the sight of those glowing golden arches; a beacon of hope for my poor bladder.

  ‘Why isn’t there a MacDonald’s when you need one?’

  ‘There is. We’re going in the wrong direction. It’s by the station.’ Jean-Luc squints at his phone. ‘Oh, tant pis, it’s closed.’

  I am going to have to do the unthinkable. I look around for an alley. Better, a tiny alley off an already tiny alley so I can urinate in the street like someone off their nuts after binge drinking all night. Though can’t you be arrested for public urination? And we’ve been through all kinds of stuff together but I don’t know Jean-Luc and Vic that well and they are impeccably turned out and I don’t want them to think that I am the kind of person who happily pisses in the street whenever the need takes her.

  I can tell Emmeline is thinking the same thing for she looks around too and then says to me, ‘Shall we take a little walk together, Sun? See if we can’t find, you know, a public convenience that no one knows about.’ She does air quotes round ‘public convenience’ so I know that what she really means is we’ll find somewhere, anywhere, for me to go and Emmeline will shield me during my escapade of shame and then we’ll never say anything about it ever again.

  Except Charlie shakes her head. ‘Well, there won’t be a public convenience open, will there? They’ll all be closed.’

  I know Emmeline likes Charlie but she’s really starting to get on my nerves with all the naysaying. I close my eyes and squeeze every muscle I have. God, it is either piss in an alley or wet myself. Lesser of two evils? I can’t decide.

  ‘Oh, we’re right by The Ritz. They must have a loo for a lady in distress.’ Vic takes my hand and starts to take me across the road.

  ‘They’re never going to let us in The Ritz!’ Emmeline says, as she scurries to keep up with us. ‘Just look at us!’

  ‘Our money is just as good as anyone else’s,’ Vic declares. ‘Not that I’m planning to book a room or anything but maybe we could order a glass of water.’

  ‘Or a small cup of coffee?’ Jean-Luc suggests hopefully.

  ‘Please stop talking about liquid,’ I beg as we get nearer and nearer to the imposing building that’s lit up and glowing like it should have a discreet sign by the door that says, ‘No riff-raff.’

  ‘Can you hang on just a little bit longer?’ Vic asks.

  I can barely speak. ‘I hope so or I might just die of utter humiliation.’

  ‘Nothing to be embarrassed about,’ Vic says, because we’ve already established that he’s beyond embarrassment. He doesn’t even know what it means. ‘One time, we got held up on the M6 for hours due to a pile-up and I had to piss in an empty milk carton.’

  ‘It wasn’t empty,’ Jean-Luc recalls with some disdain, and I would laugh but all my muscles are still on clench setting as we walk through one of the arches, because The Ritz is so grand that it has its own covered walkway to protect its guests from the elements, and right up to the door. Through the glass, I can see a huge ornate chandelier that sparkles in the dark night. My eyes follow the path of the plush red and gold carpet, which opens out into a circular foyer. Maybe not even a foyer. Cinemas have foyers, even the really grotty ones. This is something grander. A vestibule maybe. Or a rotunda. Whatever it’s called, it’s like looking into a Fabergé egg or a beautiful music box. I half expect to see an impossibly delicate ballerina slowly spinning round and round instead of a gilt-edged marble table topped with a huge vase of white flowers.

  A man in a pinstripe suit strides down the carpet towards us.

  Usually there are smart uniformed doormen outside but even The Ritz locks its doors at this time of night and the man bearing down on us, a quizzical expression on his face, will take one good look at our dishevelled appearance – even Vic’s shirt has lost its snowy whiteness by now – and tell us to piss off. But he’ll probably be more polite than that.

  I try not to jiggle as he unlocks the door and as soon as it opens, my mind is set. I’m going to storm the gilt-edged citadels of The Ritz. By the time he catches me, I’m sure I’ll have been able to find the Ladies and lock myself in a cubicle.

  The door opens just enough for me to be able to wedge myself through it and I take a step forward and that’s it! I’m off! I push past the man and everything is a red and gold blur as I race across the lobby. I don’t know where I’m going, but I see a sign to a restaurant and where’s there a restaurant, there has to be public toilets. It’s the law. Both my grandmothers and Terry’s mum have told me and countless cafe owners this on numerous occasions and I’m hobbling down the corridor, dimly aware of people behind me, my knees locked together, and I come to another door … and thank God.

  I hurl myself through the door. Then hurl myself into a cubicle. I don’t even bother sliding the lock but fumble with the button and zip on my shorts and yank them down, while I hop from foot to foot.

  Then I plonk myself down on the loo. Ah! Bliss. Sweet, sweet bliss.

  TWO MINUTES LATER

  How could I ever have known when I set out for the arduous trek to Crystal Palace all those hours ago that at some point during the night I would end up peeing in The Ritz?

  ‘Peeing in The Ritz,’ I sing under my breath to the tune of ‘Putting on The Ritz’, but there’s no one to share the joke with. If I could ever tell Terry about this night – maybe years from now when I can’t be grounded or have the Wi-Fi password withheld – he would think it was hilarious.

  It is hilarious. I’ve just peed in The Ritz and now I’m in a pastel pink powder room with a quite disturbing mural taking up one wall that features a frond-encrusted pond with lily pads and a woman peering through the fronds, while on the other side a man peers at her like a gigantic perv. The more I look at it, the less sense it makes.

  Besides, I have more important things to do, like wondering who or what is waiting for me outside the door. Could I be arrested for trespassing? Would they let me off with a caut
ion? It’s best not to think about it at all, so instead I slather myself in really expensive hand-lotion, not just my hands but my arms and legs too. Underneath the mural is a plush pink sofa and I think about sitting on it. Then I think about lying on it. Then I think about curling up and going to sleep on it because now that I no longer need to pee, I’m feeling quite tired.

  There’s a knock on the door. ‘Miss! Miss! I’m going to have to ask you to come out now.’

  One more generous squirt of hand lotion, then I slink out to find a security guard standing by the door.

  I try to remember that no man is the boss of me. I’m a warrior. Tonight I run this town. ‘Oh God, please don’t have me arrested,’ I squeak. ‘Normally I’m a law-abiding citizen, I really am, but the circumstances were beyond, beyond, extenuating.’

  I could swear that beneath his peaked cap he winks at me but his face remains blank. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the premises, miss,’ he says in the same neutral voice, and as long as I’m not being arrested I’m more than happy to be escorted back to the front entrance where Jean-Luc appears to be remonstrating with another security guard and the man in the pinstriped suit.

  ‘Mais c’est une question de vie ou de mort,’ he says, throwing his hands up. ‘Mon amie est bouleversée. Qui sait ce qu’elle pourrait faire? Elle a un historique de maladie mentale! ’

  ‘I’m so sorry. So, so sorry,’ I call out. ‘I can’t think what came over me. I promise I’ll never do it again.’

  ‘Yes, well, if you do, I’ll have to ban you from every Ritz in the world for life,’ Pinstripe Man says, but he doesn’t seem that cross about it, just shoos us out the door and locks it behind us.

  ‘High five,’ Charlie says and she looks at me with proper respect like I didn’t just storm The Ritz but stole a priceless antique on my way out the door too. ‘Dude, high five. I can’t believe you did that.’

  We high five. All of us, except Jean-Luc, who shakes his head. ‘Non. I don’t do high fives.’